Buy the company to bury the product?

That would probably cause a couple of lawsuits and would further cause decay of the mainframe.

You tell the customer ... well yes while you're paying $2000.00 to run your software, with a known change in microcode, you would only be paying $2.00 to run your software ... (Prices made up...)

What you've done is outed IBM's price gouging practices along with a realization that you can run your app on midrange (Unix) systems that are far cheaper and more resilient than the mainframe. (Hint: You try replicating your mainframe data center and then see how much it would cost...)

Oracle and Microsoft have been attacking IBM's profit center. IBM won't release the numbers, but if you listen to the street, there are some major projects under way. Only one thing. Neither Microsoft nor RAC scale efficiently. The only saving grace is that the majority of these mainframe apps would port and scream on hardware than now fits in to a 'pizza' box or two.

Fail because IBM's business practices are eroding the trust people had and their current business practices as a whole are killing the company from the inside. It just goes to show you the greed and mismanagement that will kill the company, all in the name of almighty profit.